Social Media Optimization – Is It Time To Map Our Conversations?

We create site maps so that search engines and visitors can find all the pages in our websites, so is it time to create a similar map of all our social conversations? Site maps list every page a website owner wants indexed – a social conversation map would similarly map every social conversation we wanted indexed or followed – or made available to our visitors.

I am not sure what you could call it. A social site map, a social conversation map, or my favorite, a social cite map – but then, what’s in a name? it’s the concept that’s interesting. I can certainly see a range of benefits to such a map. Obviously, if published, search engines would be able to follow the links to your conversations, and perhaps even index them. Your visitors can follow links to conversations which could lead to more followers, more links, and perhaps more likes. And for you as a website owner, it may help you keep track of past conversations and make it easy to reference them when required.

How you would develop a social cite map is another question. There is software available that helps you track current conversations – if you need to manually extract that data to build a social cite map it could become time consuming. Of course, waiting would make the creation even harder if you wanted to include old data.

A social cite map – it’s an interesting concept, and one worth considering. If the logistics could be worked out, I can see a lot of benefits to website owners, their visitors, and perhaps even search engines. What do you think? Any ideas on how we could create a ‘social cite map’ as part of our social media optimization strategies?